Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, after the Abyss
by Bug Catcher Nakata
Summary: Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter sacrifice not only their lives, but condemn themselves to an eternity of falling into the Abyss. What would that be like? In a place where so much Dust has already fallen, perhaps it's not quite as grim as it might seem. Just one chapter :) Not a slash. Rated T for mild adult themes. I wanted to give Asriel and Coulter the ending they deserved :)


And they plunged together into the Abyss.

Mrs Coulter closed her eyes and felt a chill wash over her as she left the world of the dead behind and half-fell, half-sank into what she felt in her heart to be an infinite emptiness, clutching Lord Asriel and Metatron. It was like diving into a cold lake, except that the cold wasn't only on her skin, it was inside her bones just as it was wholly removed from her body.

"What have you done," cried the voice of Metatron, the Angel who had once been the man Enoch, son of Jared and ancestor of Noah.

Mrs Coulter gave no reply, but neither she nor her Golden Monkey Daemon relaxed their grip—she didn't know if Metatron would be able to fly back out again, but she did know that she hadn't thrown herself into the abyss for all eternity just to let her quarry escape at the last moment. 'Oh Lyra,' she thought to herself, 'you'll never know what we did for you.'

She was interrupted by a strange feeling in her arms—it felt as if the angel she was holding were made of soft clay. Her first thought was that he was escaping, slipping out of her grasp. But then she realized that the Angel Metatron wasn't slipping away from her, he was slipping away altogether. She opened her eyes to see the Angel's form becoming weak, and starting to fade, already she could make out the shape of Lord Asriel behind him. Dust was trailing off Metatron's body—they were still falling, she remembered—pouring off him like fine sand being carried away by fierce ocean winds. He met Marisa's eye and she could see the hatred and anger in his face.

"Goodbye, Metatron," she said. "I'm not surprised that you lack the strength to hold yourself together now. I want you to realize, even as you die"—the Golden Monkey pulled one more feather out of his wing and gleefully crumbled it into Dust—"that you are totally, utterly defeated, that Lyra has triumphed, and I want your last thought to be that you were unfit to rule."

Metatron tried to speak, but whatever his last words would have been, they were lost to the abyss as he faded away. Mrs Coulter could only see Lord Asriel for a few moments, as the light which had shone from Metatron faded too. She saw Stelmaria, so she knew Asriel hadn't died, but he wasn't moving. His arms, which had been wrapped around Metatron, were now folded tightly across his own chest and his eyes were closed. She thought she could see blood pouring down the right side of his face, but it might just have been a shadow. Part of her wished that she could just relax and drift apart like the Angel had done, but even if it were possible, she wouldn't have done it. It wasn't her way. She rubbed her Daemon's golden fur with her right hand, and her left hand was still holding Lord Asriel's shoulder, from when she had leapt into the Abyss. She suddenly was reminded of an old scholar, long-dead, who had told her that it was known that in the absence of air, all objects fall at the same rate, no matter how heavy. 'Of course,' he had said with a wheezy chuckle, 'one is unlikely to find oneself falling in such a circumstance.' Well, here she was. She shook the image of the scholar out of her mind, and gently moved her hands to remind herself of the physical presence of both Asriel and her Daemon, and she thought she might have felt Lord Asriel stir.

"Lord Asriel?" she said.

His voice was weak, but urgent. "Marisa—Metatron, we have to …"

"Metatron is dead, it's just us now."

"Oh is he, I'm, I'm glad, what a wonderful … I suppose I should thank you."

"Yes, perhaps, although I did just drag you into the Abyss."

"I always thought you might."

Lord Asriel reached up and touched his face, which was sticky with the blood from the stone Metatron had struck against him. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but darkness, and so closed them again. "How long have we been falling?"

"Not too long."

"What do you suppose will happen now?"

Mrs Coulter looked around her, even though she could see nothing but darkness. "I would suppose that whatever is happening now will continue to happen."

"That sounds about right to me," said Lord Asriel.

"Welcome to the Republic of Heaven."

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Asriel was recovering from the blows to his head, and Mrs Coulter was thinking about the Intention Craft she had stolen from Lord Asriel's forces. Of all the things she had done, why she was thinking about that she couldn't say. She opened her mouth to apologize, but then bit her tongue. Surely if Lord Asriel had allowed her to take the craft, he had also _intended_ for her to take the craft. 'He certainly didn't intend to be plunged into the Abyss in the moment of his greatest triumph', she thought to herself and laughed, but not bitterly. She laughed in the way of a person who has just come upon a surprise ending to a novel or uncovered a piece of a puzzle which allows everything else to fit together.

"You always had an unusual sense of humor," said Lord Asriel.

"You must admit, there is some irony in a world which drove us apart in so many ways seeing fit to throw us together for eternity."

"Ah, but it wasn't our world that did it."

"Now that makes a lot of sense."

They fell quiet again, each listening to the sound of the other's breathing. There was so much to say, but the urgency of it all had faded since they would have infinite time in which to say it.

"Not for us," said Stelmaria to Lord Asriel, knowing what he thought.

"No, we must part eventually," he replied.

"Soon, I think," she said, "without food or water."

"But not for some days yet."

"Yes," and Stelmaria lay her head on Asriel's shoulder. "We did it, we made the world safe for Lyra."

"That we did," said Lord Asriel, turning to Mrs Coulter. "And now that we have time, Marisa, I suspect we have a lot of questions for each other."

"I'm sure you're right, but Asriel, I think that while we still have our physical life and strength, there is something we could ask of each other of rather a different kind."

She took his hand and they embraced, as the monkey daemon climbed over Mrs Coulter's shoulder so that he could reach out and touch Stelmaria.

The days passed by, as Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter continued their endless plunge down into the Abyss. Of course the sun did not rise and set over earth's horizons—there was no sun and no earth at all in the space between worlds, at least not yet. But their bodies kept ticking, their hearts beating in time with one another, their cells respiring and their blood flowing. They talked about all they had done, when they had been opposed to each other and when they had been on the same side, and they tried to ignore their growing hunger, thirst, and weakness. The first to die was Lord Asriel—weakened as he was by the former angel Metatron. He had started to slur his words and hallucinate vivid colors and visits from old friends, and then his Daemon Stelmaria—his life's companion—faded away. When she left him, he felt his hunger, his thirst, and his weariness disappear as well, as his ghost left his body behind, but nonetheless continued to tumble into the darkness.

"I think," said his ghost, "that I just died."

"Oh, Stelmaria," said Mrs Coulter, as the Golden Monkey let out a savage howl.

Mrs Coulter clutched her Daemon to her breast, and would have cried if she had the strength. She pitied Asriel for his death and separation from Stelmaria, but more than that, she felt pain in her heart for the coming death of the part of her Self that was her Daemon. He was her co-conspirator, feared and loathed by so many. She felt the pangs of her future loss, and sensed his loneliness at the death of the only Daemon towards which he had felt anything other than contempt. Whether such a cruel creature could feel something like love I couldn't say, and whether he truly howled for Stelmaria or rather for his own death which came days later, even Mrs Coulter didn't know for certain. When he too died, as the last of the strength in Mrs Coulter's body gave way, only the two ghosts were left to drift deeper into the space between worlds. Mrs Coulter reached out her hand to the spirit of Lord Asriel, but they two ghosts passed through each other without making contact, just as they had so often passed each other by in life. Mrs Coulter remembered how she had felt when she heard of the opening Lyra—her wonderful daughter Lyra—had made in the Land of the Dead, which had allowed the departed souls from all the words to find their oblivion. She hadn't wished such a fate upon herself, and she had escaped it in the end.

Without the rhythm of their heartbeats, time soon lost all meaning to the two drifting souls. All they had with them were their memories of their lives, which they told to each other often to keep from forgetting. Lord Asriel reminded Mrs Coulter of their affair and the duel that had cast him temporarily out of Society, and how she had watched Father MacPhail sacrifice himself to try to kill Lyra with the bomb. Mrs Coulter reminded Lord Asriel of his marshalling of troops from countless worlds to make war on the Authority, and how he had allowed her to steal the Intention Craft that she may be Lyra's agent in the innermost part of the Church. Most of all, they talked about Lyra—about all the things she had done, and their speculations as to what she could do. Her legend, how she had talked the Bear-King out of his Kingdom, freed the souls of every being who had ever died, and reset the path of humanity as the second coming of Eve, was carefully nurtured and tended by the two ghosts.

They fell together for the equivalent of many lifetimes—long enough for Lyra and Will, Mary Malone and Lord Faa to be only memories to the people of their worlds. Perhaps Lyra and Will had found each other again in the world of the dead, perhaps they walked together into the sunshine and were carried into the sky by the breeze under the solemn, respectful eye of a zalif. Serafina Pekkala might have reached her old age, no longer clan queen, but still flying her cloud-pine and carrying her cherished memories of Faader Coram, and Lyra who she watched grow up, and remake the world, and grow old. And the tales of all these people were kept alive by the two forsaken ghosts that tumbled for eternity. Around that time the ghosts noticed something that had been happening too slowly for them to perceive. At some point, a faint glow had begun to gather around them. As they dreamed up futures for their former world as varied as the universes which had gathered together for the battle against the clouded mountain, they noticed a shimmering. Not the terrible shimmer of a spectre, but the shimmer that Asriel had seen when Baruch had come dying into his room while he had been alive—for the first time, they could see each other's ghosts.

"Do you think, after all this time, we've finally become accustomed to the darkness?" said Asriel.

"No, it's not that." Marisa could see the outline of Lord Asriel's spirit, just as she had seen his body through the fading form of Metatron. "There's light here now, that wasn't before. If I didn't know better, I'd say that it was…"

"Dust."

"Yes."

"Marisa, this is so strange. I haven't felt warmth since we plunged into the darkness, and I still haven't, but I feel something like it."

"Do you think ghosts can see Dust, then?" she said.

"I don't know, perhaps they can."

Marisa thought for a moment. "No, no if they could, you would have seen it when you died, on me and on the golden fur of, of—" but she couldn't finish the sentence, choked with sadness as she was.

"You're right, and I saw nothing then."

"There must be a lot of it here now, for us to perceive it," said Mrs Coulter.

"Yes—perhaps not as much as in the North where I made the bridge, but some quantity approaching that. I suppose there was a lot of dust that fell into the abyss after the bomb went off."

"And who knows what other ways there may be into this place."

"And now it is gathering around us," said Asriel with wonder.

"It probably doesn't have much else around here to gather around," said Mrs Coulter.

They thought about the gathering of Dust around their ghosts, attracted by them as the only consciousness in the Abyss. They had died not knowing that the subtle knife had made many thousands of openings to let Dust pour through over the centuries, that it had leaked through every gap between every world. The Dust, like them, had drifted down endlessly—until they themselves had fallen in. At that moment, the pattern of falling Dust had changed, taken on a purpose, as the Dust sought them out, two conscious souls thinking and talking about the world. Nobody could say how much Dust had fallen into this gap between all the worlds before the angels closed all the wounds that the Subtle Knife had opened, but there were a lot of wounds open for a very long time.

They fell for many generations more, and the light around them grew and brightened as their memories of their pasts dimmed and became fainter. By the time even Serafina Pekkala would have been visited by Yambe-Akka and gone from the earth, it was just light enough for them to be able to perceive each other's faces. By the time the youngest of Serafina's daughters would have passed too, all that the ghosts carried of Asriel and Marisa was his pride and her cruelty, and the memory and legend of Lyra which still they cultivated. But even as they forgot themselves, they continued to attract and gather the Dust, and they began to take the forms of Angels. When they looked at each other, they could see their human selves as they had appeared to each other in life, Asriel's fierce black eyes and Marisa's cold beauty, but they could also see the architecture that the Dust had made around them. When they moved, the trails of light moved too, and the brighter they became, the faster the Dust seemed drawn to them—or at least, the more they could perceive it. It seemed that as they became more Dust and less ghost, they could see it as if they had been looking through Mary Malone's amber spyglass. They saw now Dust drifting towards them from every side, and from unfathomable distances away. And more time passed, time enough for a hundred queens of Serafina Pekkala's clan, time enough for Lyra's name and deeds to pass from history, to legend, to myth; for the last Alethiometer to be lost, the last Armoured Bear to perish, and the last Gyptian to forsake her boat. And at that moment, Mrs Coulter reached out and moulded some Dust into a ball, and then unravelled it into a thin thread, which Lord Asriel took and wove into a thin sheet. It could have taken a year, or ten, to weave the quivering Dust, but he did it. And they moulded the Dust into more and more shapes, larger and larger, and the more they did that, the more Dust flowed towards them, and grew the world that they had begun to build. They shaped the Dust into all the patterns they faintly remembered from the world they had cast themselves out of, into jagged mountains a thousand times taller than they, and broad valleys ten thousand times as wide. They made the deep ocean trenches and the land—it hardly seems possible to speak of 'time' now, so long did they labor over every piece of the world they built together. They wove the Dust into all these things, but still Dust fell like rain onto the surface of their world, and this Dust they left unwoven and it turned the valleys into rivers and gave movement to the oceans.

Neither of them could say where it started, but somewhere there was a spark, and a part of their world felt a frisson of connection, which led to another and another. They felt the movement grow until it was a tide, and they saw that parts of what they had made were changing. They watched for so long that Lyra's world perhaps was no more—certainly if it still existed none of the creatures who walked upon it would be recognisable to any of us. But Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel watched from on high life spread across their land, and Asriel burned with pride while Mrs Coulter watched with pleasure as some forms devoured others and were devoured in turn. At some point, the Dust stopped falling from the sky, or at least, it fell much more slowly—almost all of the Dust in the Abyss was gathered there now. The two angels watched as the life became more and more complex, rose out of the ocean, and started to remake the world even as they had. They saw that the beings could speak with one another, and since they were made of Dust too, they could understand what they said. Lord Asriel appeared to them, and told them the story of Lyra, in whose honour their world had been made, and that they were the creations of Lord Asriel. As he was speaking to them, Mrs Coulter also appeared, and she told them that they were her creations too, and they could see that she was cruel and they did not want to cross her.

"Always remember Lyra, and spread her story amongst yourselves," Lord Asriel told them, "Or be prepared for furious punishment."  
And so they spread the story, and their culture grew and evolved, and their societies rose and fell with the help of Marisa and Asriel. Sometimes they helped them grow, to survive, to triumph over some adversity or other. And other times Mrs Coulter would strike them down for no reason, just to watch cities burn and empires tear themselves apart, and sometimes they were destroyed by Lord Asriel because they wounded his pride by forgetting Lyra, or by failing to praise him. The people made of Dust were like you or I—they grew up in a vast world, they fought wars, fell in love, created inventions, and always Marisa and Asriel kept close watch over the world, and took great interest in what happened there.

And Lord Asriel looked into the shining face of Mrs Coulter the Angel, and they looked upon the Republic of Heaven that they had wrought together in the Abyss, and they were happy.


End file.
